When a Robot Makes You Dinner

At the restaurant Spyce, dishes are whipped up by a robotic chef built by four recent M.I.T. grads, with input from Daniel Boulud.

Last month, four recent M.I.T. graduates, engineers with a shared passion for robotics, gathered in a lab at a startup incubator near Boston, to show off their pet project. They stood around a hulking console that looked like an old mainframe computer but was actually a self-cleaning robotic kitchen, designed to prepare an entire meal in less than three minutes. They call their contraption the Spyce Kitchen, which spawned a nickname, the Spyce Boys, and, as they introduced themselves, they might have been members of a boy band taking the stage.

“I’m the lead electrical engineer, making sure the motors and sensors are working,” Brady Knight, a bookish twenty-three-year-old from the Bay Area, wearing a black-and-white gingham shirt, said.

“I’m the C.O.O.,” Kale Rogers, twenty-four and known to the others as Ginger Spyce, because of his shock of red hair, said. “I do a lot of stuff—designing the branding experience, the whole customer experience, managing the restaurant.”

“I’m the C.E.O.,” Michael Farid, twenty-six, chimed in. He is a native of Egypt, with a buzz cut and the only master’s degree in the group. “I sort of, like, find a direction in how to identify ways to further culinary expectations.”

“Luke, he’s the lead mechanical engineer,” Farid went on, pointing at Luke Schlueter, a soft-spoken twenty-three-year-old champion swimmer from St. Louis. “He builds stuff. We all designed certain parts of it, but he put the entire thing together.”

Schlueter showed how the inner workings of the steel-cased robot kitchen are visible through its glass façade. Seven cameras, named for the Seven Dwarfs, keep watch over its functioning. “You’ve got Happy, Grumpy, and Sneezy over there,” he said. “And they’re monitoring full run-through tests.”

After months of food-safety and emissions evaluations, the National Sanitation Foundation had cleared the Spyce Kitchen for commercial use. Later this month, a nearly identical copper-clad unit will begin serving customers (seven different “bowls” will be available, for $7.50 each) at a fast-casual restaurant called Spyce, which will open near the Freedom Trail, in downtown Boston.

Another member of the team, although not technically a Spyce Boy, is the chef Daniel Boulud, whom Farid reached out to, with an e-mail, in 2016. To the Boys’ surprise, Boulud responded immediately, and offered to take a look at the robot the next time he was in Boston.

Most fledgling cooks would be cowed by the idea of preparing a meal for Boulud. But, when the chef visited, the engineers simply pushed a button, and two and a half minutes later a bowl of chicken-bacon-and-sweet-potato hash was served.

“I go, I meet them, I’m super impressed,” Boulud, who signed on as the team’s culinary director, recalled. “I like them, also—they’re not sort of crazy renegades. They’re clean-cut, they’re intelligent, and they’re passionate about food.”

Boulud has been consulting with the fifth Spyce Boy, Sam Benson, the outfit’s head chef, who is thirty-three, about recipes. The technology has come a long way since the first iteration, which was conceived as an engineering solution to every hungry college student’s gripe—where to get good, cheap food fast. (It’s the same market that the meal-replacement drink Soylent is after.) The Boys built the prototype in the basement of their fraternity, Delta Upsilon, using microcontrollers, inexpensive oven hoods, household power strips, and plastic trash bins, and attaching an air-conditioner to keep ingredients cool.

That old model works much like the new, state-of-the-art version, which has finely calibrated temperature and volume sensors and seven custom-forged “cooking woks.” In the lab, Farid typed an order into a computer tablet, and the machine roared to life. The makings of a Moroccan bowl—pre-measured chickpeas, chopped tomatoes, olives, currants, and freekeh, dispensed from individual hoppers—travelled across a mechanized track, Rube Goldberg style, and into a nonstick barrel-shaped pot heated over an induction panel. The pot, like a miniature cement mixer, rocked and rolled, sizzled and seared, mixing and cooking simultaneously, before tilting its steaming contents into a waiting bowl. A hot-water jet immediately scrubbed the pot clean.

The demonstration might have ended there, a fully mechanized marvel. But, while the technological goal is maximum speed and efficiency—“through-put,” in the lingo of fast-casual restaurants—the Spyce Boys, in deference to Boulud, had decided to add a human touch to every robot-cooked bowl that is served.

Benson pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and loomed over a garnishing station stocked with chopped cilantro, toasted almonds, avocado crema, and tamarind-date chutney—the same toppings that diners will be offered at the restaurant.

“A bowl, a jumbled-up mixture, is fine,” Farid said. “But, if you want a customer to get really excited about something, it has to taste great, smell great, and look great. And it has to come with a smile.” ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the April 16, 2018, issue, with the headline “Chefless.”

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